


your life looks good on you

by kenopsia (indie)



Category: Carry On - Rainbow Rowell
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-24
Updated: 2015-12-24
Packaged: 2018-05-09 00:01:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5517977
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indie/pseuds/kenopsia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Agatha runs until she stops.</p>
            </blockquote>





	your life looks good on you

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mwrites](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mwrites/gifts).



> Just a treat because I saw mwrites' yule letter, and I thought. I'm worried about Agatha, too.

Sometimes, when the soles of her shoes are wet, the words are right on the tip of her tongue.  _ Rain rain, go away…  _ she thinks, but she keeps it to herself, tucked away like a secret. It feels good, like holding the an ace. There’s something grounding about the squelch, about getting home and throwing them in the dryer, the rhythmic banging that comes with a thing done slowly. 

She buys herself a pair of rainboots, glossy red and she can hear her mother’s voice letting her know that they’re straddling the line between couture and tacky. 

San Diego is gorgeous and grimy in equal measure and she splashes through the infrequent summer storms with aplomb. She takes Lucy out for long walks, and she knows how the two of them look, like a girl with too much money and not enough sense, and an expensive silky dog, and a posh accent to boot. She wonders what people are thinking of her, and then wonders  _ if  _ someone is thinking of her, which feels a bit like an improvement. 

In August, she notices that pens and pencils go on sale in the corner store where she picks up bananas and crisps and she thinks about school, wondering in a detached sort of way how she would have liked it without all the danger. Not this year, perhaps, but some day she will find out how she likes school without the slick kind of fear that sits in your throat.

She watches old TV shows, the X-Files and Xena, a little bit of Buffy, curled up with Lucy. Dana Scully is surrounded by the weird, Agatha thinks, but she’s not tarried back and forth by the sweep of it. Intrigued, she falls into the internet rabbit hole. Gillian Anderson was twenty-three when she took on the role. That’s not so far away from where Agatha is now. Agatha puts a picture of her by the bathroom mirror to look at in the morning when she curls her hair, clutter on every surface and precarious mugs stacking up. 

*

She starts looking for a job when summer passes its peak. She has no doubt that her mum would keep paying rent, even if she didn’t, but she and Lucy have explored the city for long enough alone — she’d like to tuck herself back in to having friends, to try having a life all her own.

And, as she’s always found to be the case, as soon as you’re ready to make friends, you do. It’s like opening the kitchen cabinet and finding a mug in the dark. She thinks about all the people she passes on the street with their paper cups of coffee, not so much holding them as they are cradling, like they’re holding on to the best part of their day. It seems easy enough — she wants to be the best part of someone’s day. She parts her hair on the left and braids it most of the way down, loose, and goes to fill out an application at the one across the street from her apartment. 

She doesn’t get the job. The man she speaks with makes a joke about how awkward eighteen year old boys are ever supposed to get anything done when gorgeous eighteen year old girls are around. She laughs along to be polite before she realizes that she doesn’t have to. 

“Thank you,” she says, holding out a hand to shake his, with the right pressure and speed. “That will be all.” He looks a little thrown to be dismissed by her and she feels a little surge of joy. Agatha lingers in the shop until he goes back into the back, and then she gets in line. 

There is a girl at the register, probably in hearing distance of Agatha’s conversation with the manager. “That guy seems like a prat,” Agatha says. She realizes too late that she just sounds bitter, and hastens to add, “If he was worried about distractions, you’d be out on your ear. You’re super pretty..” 

“Oh,” she says, fretting with the end of her ponytail. “He’s gross, definitely. He kind of tried to tell me the same thing, but I told him I’m only interested in girls.”

“Wow. How long have you had to pretend to be into girls?” Agatha asks. 

Megan’s face shutters a bit. “Well. I mean. It’s not a hardship.”

Agatha laughs, too loud. “Oh shit, I’m so sorry. That was totally tactless of me. I’m Agatha and I pinky swear I’m not always a jackass.” 

“You’re on strike one,” Megan warns, but she looks like she might be on the edge of laughing. 

And there’s a San Diego friend. The others follow quickly enough, because if there’s one thing Agatha’s good at (and to be clear, Agatha has numerous skills and good qualities, but if she had to  _ pick one _ ) it’s making friends. Megan introduces her to Dietrich, who’s doing an exchange year from Germany, and his friend Patric-with-no-k from Alabama who jumps back into a drawl when he gets tired. Agatha isn’t sure whether Patric and Dietrich are dating or just best friends with no boundaries, but she’s amused by the puppy-sprawl of them when they hang out in Megan’s cramped studio apartment. 

She meets Luna at the dog park when Lucy makes a beeline for the briefly open door and shouting “Lu! Get over here!” brings over the wrong mammal. Lu-short-for-Luna is also away from home, so she also misses dressage and more importantly, Spiddles the Appaloosa. 

“Oh god,” Agatha cries, scooping Lu-short-for-Lucy up and trying to keep her from making any further leaps. “Don’t even get me started. I feel like I work all week just to bribe the stable boy at home to treat Cammy like his best friend.”

“That’s nothing,” Luna says, swiping the back of her neck. She looks both amused and a little embarrassed when she says, “I think I’m in a long distance relationship-slash-catfish scam to keep ours giving Spiddles special treatment.”

Agatha is thrilled to be having this conversation. “Please tell me there is a long, ridiculous story,” she says, grinning. “And then, you know, tell me the whole thing.”

Luna has an elegantly arched dog — a bedlington, Agatha thinks, although she didn’t recognize it at first without the roman nose — and they’re in San Diego. They find a restaurant that lets them park the dogs beneath their table. 

“I know we don’t really know each other,” Agatha gasps at one point, midway through dinner. “But you have to show me.”

Luna does one better and takes out her phone to read in a very quiet voice: “And then what? And then a winky face. With a nose! Who still does the nose?” 

“No respectable stablehands,” Agatha says. “Please go on.”

*

Another thing that comes out of  _ not  _ getting a Starbucks job — there’s a community pinboard. People are looking for neighbors, for someone to book their garage bands, or walk their dogs, or go to speed dating events. Agatha gets to be near compulsive about picking them up. You never know who you’re going to need and for what. 

It’s how she finds a little old lady name Azucena who makes fresh tamales on monday and delivers. Agatha makes a standing date with her, learns enough Spanish to say  _ thank you  _ and ask about her health, and then a little more by accident. Azucena thinks her accent is funny, and some mondays Agatha asks if she’d like to come inside. She says no the first time, but then starts scheduling Agatha’s delivery for last. 

The next time she has trouble with the kitchen sink, which isn’t draining, she thinks  _ echar agua al mar  _ before she laughs at herself. She sends Penny a text about it, since she was always interested in foreign-language magic.  _ Hey P can you actually send water back in the ocean with this? give it a shot, xo.  _

It feels good to reach out, even though half of her hopes, imagines, the little string of words running out of steam and falling out of the sky before they reach her. The other half wants Penelope to send her a three page analysis of what situations you could use the expression in, and why it wouldn’t be strictly ethical to attempt to mess with tides. 

Penelope says  _ thanks  _ complete with a picture of an open notebook that Agatha recognizes from their last year of school, filled with all the phrases Penelope planned to go through and dissect at length, testing them out in all manner of situations even tangentially related. Half of the lines are crossed out, and some have parentheticals ( _ sort of worked but only if the weeds had a transplanting element _ ). Agatha knows she isn’t looking at the first page. 

It’s not that she’s sworn off magic, it’s just that for the most part she doesn’t need it. 

In movies, magic is all about immediacy and convenience. Summon something now, get rid of it this instant, get what you want, know that it’s raining before it happens. The thing is, magic isn’t the only thing that does deals with the immediate future. She can call her mother during a hot soak and talk to her, thousands of miles from her. She turn on the news for the forecast. She does that after microwaving the night before’s take-away. The world happens now and now and now, and it happens conveniently; she hardly needs magic to make that happen. 

The other part of magic, the part not duplicated by modern science and invention, is about force of will, is about destruction. She thinks about Ebb, shouting for her to run for her life, and how far she had to run before she felt like she’d done just that. Agatha is not interested in the sort of power that takes something away from someone, the kind of magic that razes someone’s homeland. 

Even if she hardly uses magic, though, she still thinks about it. It would be nice to have someone to talk about it with. She sits on the subdued, tentative desire to make a magical friend. It’s not urgent. In fact, she’s not even sure she’s ready. She keeps pushing the whole issue to the back of her mind, like holiday decorations in the off-season. 

She’s combing through her decorative bowl of business cards in a frenzy of tidying one night. “Oh, Lu,” she says, a little startled. She holds it up so Lucy can see.  _ The perfect words can feel like magic.  _

*

She goes the a writing workshop. She might as well. She asks her mum to send her one of her old Watford sweatshirts, just to be flip. When it comes, she slips it on and stares at herself in the mirror. The last time she wore it, she was still at school, before she’d realized she had to get away if she ever wanted to be anything else, anything but a timid girl afraid to plan a future because she wasn’t sure she’d get one. 

She’s divorced from that frazzled child, doesn’t see any more of that version of herself when she meets her own eyes in the mirror. There’s still magic from her schooldays in the sweater — she’d forgotten what an attractive fit you can get with a  _ like a glove.  _

The workshop lets her down in the first ten minutes when no one is wearing anything to identify themselves as a fellow magic user, not that she expected any of them to be similarly dressed in a Salem Institute pullover. She hadn’t even been aware of that as something she was hoping for until it didn’t come true. 

Minute eleven, though, things get interesting. The workshop doesn’t let her down again. 

One week they ask her to share. She says  _ yes,  _ and spends the week sitting in her apartment. “Okay, Miss Lawless,” she says to the dog, tapping away. And then, without thinking: “ _ Let’s get down to business. _ ” 

Her focus is incredible. 

The reviews she gets back from her workshop are generally kind, because it’s a supportive space. Their group leader is greying at the temples, gorgeous and still finely crafted, tells her that she’s overreached a bit, but he likes the underbelly. He says he’s charmed by the way she seems to side-step idioms and Agatha bites her lip against a grin. 

_ I’m side stepping idioms so that no one will be charmed,  _ she thinks, but instead she says thanks, and they move on. She's never thought about it before, but her magical education has trained her to think certain ways about language, to flip words upside down and look at them from the bottom, the top, the sides. 

*

Megan picks her up a flyer from the coffee shop when she’s sick, too sick to have visited for a few days. “Community theater?” Agatha says blearily, only one eye cracked open. She feels like leftovers, tired and clumpy. 

“ _ Yes! _ ” Megan says, climbing right into bed with her. She shoves Agatha’s computer from under her side to the floor. 

It almost sounds like fun, and her feverish brain almost tells Megan she’ll give it a go, but then she thinks about what community theater usually means — She can hardly read Shakespeare when practically every line is rife with untapped energy. 

“You should try it,” she encourages. “But I’m just going to die in this bed.”

*

A year after graduation, Penelope says, “ _ Something something _ , I’m going to be in the States in June.” She says it through a telephone connection that’s not great. 

Agatha climbs onto a chair. “Tell me that again, P?” 

“I  _ said, _ ” Penelope says, in her elastic voice. She gets far away as she says it and Agatha realizes she’s sat her mobile down to cast a  _ can you hear me now,  _ which Agatha thinks will probably lose it’s magic pretty soon. Next year at the latest. Regardless, when Penelope comes back, Agatha  _ can  _ hear her with much more clarity. 

“I’m going to be in the States in June. For Micah’s birthday,” she says, “and you know, probably an engagement sometime in there.”

Agatha rolls her eyes. “Leave it to you to plan all the romance out of your whole life.” 

“Hey,” Penelope protests. “I happen to think having a significant other who is unlikely to forget your romantic milestones because you’ve strategically clustered them around other things they know sounds very romantic.”

“When you put it that way,” Agatha says. She talks to Penelope sometimes, not as often because they’re both busy, but after all the mess, there’s still love there. “Let me know when you have some exact dates, and I’ll put you up for a few days at the tail end.”

*

When Penny comes, she and Megan and Luna go out dancing. Megan and Luna leave early together, because they’re trying it on. They both hug Penelope at the end of the night. 

They go for dinner at a place Agatha likes that stays open all night, and their Penny gives her a sly, secret smile over carne asada, cantina music hanging in the air. 

“What,” Agatha demands. 

“Your new life looks good on you,” Penny says, arranging cilantro artfully before squeezing a lime over her taco.

“A lot of things look good on me,” Agatha says, teasing and glancing at her nails. 

“I mean it,” Penelope says. 

“You never say anything you don’t,” Agatha replies, smiling back at her. She takes her back to her apartment.

She puts cookies in the oven and Penelope sits on the counter. She’s broader than Agatha remembers, shoulders and the spread of her hips. 

“I hope you’ll come to my wedding,” Penelope says. 

“Of course I will,” Agatha tells her. 

“Back in England,” Penelope goes on, voice dark.

“Did you think I was never going to go back?”

“No,” Penelope says, “but I didn’t know, did I? None of us do. Besides, you know Simon will be there. And Baz. He’s, well. He’s a good friend.”

“And Simon’s boyfriend,” Agatha smiles ruefully. “I do still have a facebook.”

“And that,” she acknowledges. 

“Everyone runs into exes sometimes,” she says, and she means it. 

*

Agatha doesn’t know who put the dishes away last, but somehow the mugs end up a shelf above where they usually are. Probably Luna, with her gazelle arms, forgetting about the rest of them at floor level.

She has to hop for one and overreaches. It hits the floor and shatters. 

It’s just like fighting: you don’t have to use the trump card if you know you have it. Being right, Agatha has always thought, should be just for you.  _ Everybody do your share,  _ she thinks, grinning a little. 

She bends down to clean up the mess. But then, she thinks, sometimes you can play the hand you’re dealt — it’s not cheating. 

She says the words. 

*

At the last writing group of the summer, there is someone off to the side wearing something that catches her eyes. It takes about an hour to get a chance to talk to him alone. “So. Salem,” Agatha says. It’s not like they have to do small talk. 

“Yes,” he says, looking tentative. “I’m Will.”

Will is probably biracial, brown and dusted with freckles. He is, objectively speaking, very handsome. “Agatha,” she tells him, putting out her hand, “Watford.”

“Oh my God, what a relief,” Will says, suddenly beaming full-force. “I’m so happy to meet you.”

“Likewise,” Agatha says, a little bemused. 

“You don’t understand,” he says, “I moved out here a year ago, and I haven’t met  _ anyone _ since.”

Amusement bubbles up inside of Agatha. “I do know a little bit about that.”

She keeps him too late, keeps trying to excuse him but it feels so nice to talk to someone who uses magic but who also doesn’t know who she is. That she’s the girl who ran. At the end of the night, the coffeehouse dimming the ligths to subtly move them somewhere else, Agatha says, “I know this is forward… but have you ever been to a magical wedding?”


End file.
